Smoke and Mirrors

eBay Developers Program: Enhancements to Best Offer

This is good stuff. Best Offer is probably one of the better eBay features since Second Chance Offer (even though that has fallen victim to spam somewhat, I still say it helps way more than not). I’m excited to see things like counter-offer implemented in the API as well, which will allow third parties to implement all sorts of interesting things on top of that.

When are offers useful to eBay sellers? A couple of major scenarios:
1. When the industry naturally lends itself to this type of behavior. In particular, eBay sellers who get product from manufacturers where MAP pricing is enforced. A good explanation of this concept is here. The idea is that you put the listing out there at your MAP price, and accept offers under that price and you’re totally in the clear.

2. Where the industry naturally tends towards haggling. Jewelry is a great example. Many high ASP types of products are also in this space.

Features like this can really drive higher sales for sellers when they have abilities to respond to buyers quickly. If a buyer asks you for something and it takes you several days to respond, well, then you have probably lost that buyer (moved onto another item) — this is why automation based on business rules is important. (I know an offer is a binding contract, but try really enforcing that if the buyer decides they made a mistake).

Anyways, cool stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.